SAP Mobile Docs – An enterprise ‘dropbox’

Of the many enterprise mobility trends, the two gaining a large traction are Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) and free cloud based file sharing service with mobile apps. What does it mean to an enterprise?

A recent survey conducted over 4000 employees across industries revealed that 66% of them use free file sharing. Worse: 55% do this without alerting the IT (or, IT has no control on this). This creates a demand for a secure content sharing on desktop, tablets and mobile devices since employees need access to work documents outside the office.

The recent launch of SAP Mobile Docs prompted me to have a firsthand experience. Within a week of creating an instance, test running its features and so on, I had my entire setup ready and integrated with my company’s Knowledge Management/Sharepoint® system with amazing results! We were able to see how some of the features made accessing documents/artifacts a breeze on any device (PC, Laptop, Tablet and Smartphones)!

SAP Mobile Docs has the highest level of security to protect files and it enforces policies to prevent leakage of confidential data. Data encryption is applied for the data in motion and at the rest.

The major challenge for SAP in this space is that the commercial providers have also started offering business version like Dropbox® for business which is launched in early April 2013. How is SAP going to take this challenge and make a better SAP Mobile Doc offering will be an interesting discussion topic.